However, the potential for chat apps in financial services is by no means limited to social payments. Facebook has already confirmed that they are pursuing Wechat’s success, venturing into eCommerce. This is only the beginning.

The introduction of chatbots on the Facebook messenger platform could revolutionize the way we look at relationship banking. Digibank in India is based entirely on a chat interface, and allows its customers to do all their everyday banking needs through a chat interface.

Even opening their initial bank account. By applying machine learning and natural language processing, the chat interface is able to handle a wide variety of everyday banking use-cases that was previously solved by navigating through user-unfriendly mobile banking apps or contacting customer service representatives.

The bots for messenger platform represent a unprecedented opportunity for incumbents to increase customer engagement. Banks are in possession of vast amount of user data that is invaluable for unsupervised machine learning as well as intangible know-how through years of experience for supervised machine learning.

Chat apps and virtual assistants is predicted to be the future of user interaction, and may even replace traditional web browsers and traditional online search as we know it. Banks should not underestimate the disruptive power of chat apps. Remember, it was a banker who once said: The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.